I love little simple life hacks and am constantly seeking out and inventing new ones. Here are three that you can do in the next ten minutes. None of them are going to save your life, but each one will improve your daily experience for the rest of your life.

Tighten up your Keychain

A couple months ago I was at the cafe in The Standard, my old stomping ground in LA. The waitress had a retractable keycard holder, something I’d been thinking of buying for the past few weeks, but hadn’t remembered to actually purchase.

“Weird question– where did you get that retractable thing? I’ve really wanted one for a couple weeks.”

“Oh, they give them to us at work,” she paused, “you can have mine. I’ll just say I lost it.”

I tipped her more than the thing could possible cost, and have been living in keychain bliss ever since. Put away your #1 Mom keychain and get yourself one of these sick puppies. Attach it to your waistband, and always have easy access to your keys. When you’re done unlocking the door, just let go and the key goes back into place. While you’re at it, throw one of these tiny little flashlights on there, too. I use mine all the time.

Actually, while we’re optimizing your hip, get one of these as well. It’s a tiny awesome pen that you can attach to your belt loop or even to your retractable thing if you don’t have many keys. I use mine just about every day.

Learn to Tie Your Shoes like Ian

I used to tie my shoes like a peasant, and then I stumbled on this site, which is completely dedicated to tying shoes. Only on the internet. Five years later, I’ve never looked back. I can tie my shoes in just a second or two, and it’s so satisfying that it makes me smile pretty much every time I do it.

Banish stupid newsletters

How annoying is it when you rent a car and then for the rest of eternity, or at least until you hit the unsubscribe button, you get a weekly newsletter on the best rental rates in Kentucky? Very annoying.

Here’s a trick I came up with: add a filter in your email which searches the body for the text “subscribed”, “unsubscribe”, and “subscription”. That will match pretty much every annoying newsletter. I have mine moved to a folder called “bulk”, which I check once every few days. Since it’s wholly immoral to use my own trick against me, put “tynan” in the “doesn’t have” box if you use gmail.

Related Posts

Cook a Super Healthy Meal in One Pot in Twenty Minutes

A quick and easy recipe to cook a super healthy delicious meal in about twenty minutes.

Six Ways to Be Benefically Weird Today

I was talking with Ramit Sethi the other day, and he said something interesting. He told me that his [...]

I just got back from Peoria, AZ, where I gave a speech about risk from the perspective of a former professional gambler. The takeaways are:

• Evaluate risks logically, considering the payoff and probability
• Make risk taking a habit
• Hard decisions don’t matter very much
• Judge yourself

Enjoy, and let me know if you’d like to hire me to speak at your sweet event:

Tynan’s Speech: Not Taking Risks is Risky from Tynan on Vimeo.

Related Posts

VIDEO: The Pacific-Atlantic Road Race

Todd and I discover that there’s no documented record for fastest time driving between the two oceans, so we attempt to set the record ourselves.

VIDEO and CONTEST – Ramit Sethi’s Financial Bootcamp

Ramit Sethi from I Will Teach You to be Rich and I set up a contest to help promote his new six week financial bootcamp

VIDEO: Tour of my RV

A walkthrough of my RV including some of the modifications I’ve done to it. The HD video was taken with my Panasonic GF1.

Here’s a question I get a lot. “Hey, I really want to do ( some cool project or life change ), and I have it all figured out, but there’s no way for me to ( overcome one single obstacle )”.

I like receiving questions and am usually happy to answer them, but this one drives me up the wall. There’s NO WAY? Really?

Notice that the question isn’t “Hey, I really want to do ( some cool project or life change ), and I have it all figured out, but I can’t figure out how to ( overcome one single obstacle ). So far I’ve tried ( one possible solution ) and ( another possible solution ) and ( a third possible solution )”.

I’ve never gotten that question.

Here’s how doing hard things actually works: You work on it until you hit a roadblock. Once you hit the roadblock, you try to figure out a solution. If that doesn’t work, you try something else, and keep trying new things until you finally solve the problem.

Thinking isn’t enough. If you think you can’t solve a problem, try anyway. It’s way too easy to think ourselves out of hard work. Decide that you can’t conquer something only once you’ve come at it from every possible angle.

Most people fail in their mind well before the action ever surfaces to real life.

A common manifestation of this question is people wanting to travel but not knowing how to make money on the road. Fair enough– making money on the internet is a bit tricky because if you know an easy way to do it you don’t tell anyone, and the hard ways take time and effort.

You wouldn’t believe the simple things that stop people, though. I remember one guy saying he couldn’t afford the web hosting and domain name. That’s about five dollars a month. You mean to tell me that you think you’re going to have a successful business, but you aren’t scrappy enough to find a way to come up with five bucks a month?

I find that a lot of my advice boils down to this: do something now. Just do something. Move in any direction that isn’t the polar opposite of your goal. Thinking isn’t a substitute for action, it’s leverage for your action. Without action, thinking won’t get you anywhere.

Do something now.

It has been surreal to see the pictures of the devastation of Haiti. Normally when these disasters happen and circulate around the internet I don’t feel much of a connection to them. This one is different to me.

I spent a few days there last year and really had an amazing experience. I knew that it was the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, and was a bit scared to go. I thought it might be dangerous. My fears were unfounded… I felt safe there, even walking the unlit streets at night. No one so much as asked me for a dollar, which blew me away. The people were poor, but they were warm and generally seemed pretty happy. Everyone was so friendly to me, from the people that hosted me and suggested that I stay for a month or two, to the dancers at a random dance practice, who came up and invited me to see their show when it was ready.

Despite only being there for a couple days, I loved Haiti and felt a connection to it. I spent a bunch of time at an orphanage and a kids school, running around with the kids, playing with them, taking pictures and letting them see themselves on the screen, and letting them (try to) braid my hair.

It’s one thing to hear a news report about a disaster, but it’s another to see photos of buildings I saw just a few months ago that are now crumbled. I saw a photo of some survivors and one of the kids looks like one of the kids I met at the orphanage, although I’m not totally sure it’s him. But what really struck me is not being able to get in touch with the people I stayed with there. They check their couchsurfing profiles every day, but they haven’t logged in since the earthquake.

Hopefully they’re okay, but with the high death and injury tolls, it’s very likely that at least one of the very kind and generous people I met didn’t make it.

I waffled on donating money, not because I don’t want to help, but because it seems so insignificant. Really, I’d like to fly down there myself and do what I can. I donated a small amount of money, didn’t feel any sort of satisfaction, and thought about what I could do to leverage what I have.

So here’s what I’ve come up with: pre-order a signed copy of Life Nomadic in the next week and I’ll donate 100% of the money I receive to the Haitian relief charity I think is best (I’ll do research before donating).

Now, I’m not actually ready to release the book. It might be a few more weeks until it’s ready. I was planning on waiting, but I figured this is worth jumping the gun on.

Order any time before midnight PST on January 20, and I’ll donate the money to a Hatian relief charity. When the books are ready I will sign yours and mail it to you at my cost. If you want something specific in the inscription, put it in the comment section of the Paypal payment.

To buy the book, click the Buy Now button. Feel free to buy a bunch of copies and give them away, and send your friends here if you think they’d like the book. For more information on Life Nomadic, click here, but buy the book through the link on this page.

EDIT:US only, please. I will honor international orders before I added this, but the shipping is too much for me to cover if a lot of people order outside the US.

Also, to see some of the photos I took in Haiti last year, go here.

Related Posts

Life Nomadic Book Coming Soon

Announcing my new book: Life Nomadic.

Life Nomadic is Ready for Download!

My book, Life Nomadic, is available in ebook form. Download it now to learn everything you’ve ever wanted to know about being a nomad and hardcore traveling.

Read the First two Chapters of Life Nomadic for Free NOW! + A Contest

Read the first two chapters of Life Nomadic for FREE, plus an easy contest to win a free copy of the book before it’s even released!

Anderson, Todd, Stuart, Autumn, Tynan, Grace

“Umm… I have to kick out a lot of bums and crackheads. Take this.”

It was a puzzling statement. He handed us three bags of ground coffee, worth almost fifty dollars. We thought he was a fan of what we were doing, so we smiled at him. He didn’t smile back. Then it hit — we were being kicked out of Blue Bottle Coffee for not wearing pants, and being bribed with coffee to not make a scene. That’s probably a smart idea; people who go to respected coffee establishments without pants on might be more prone to causing scenes than the other patrons.

We took part in 2010 No Pants Subway Ride, a worldwide event where people take off their pants and ride on the subway at a particular time. There’s no cause, no mission, and no statement. Just hordes of people roaming around downtown without pants.

What I really like about the event is that it takes something people really want to do– walk around without pants– and makes it okay. There were over a thousand people participating, both pretty and ugly, thin and fat. People were thongs, briefs, boxers, lacy panties, and superman underwear. It was clear that most people weren’t uncomfortable walking around in public in their underwear, they were just uncomfortable with the social stigma of it. Take away the stigma by hosting an event, and it’s fun.

Even in an uninhibited person like myself, walking around bottomless fostered a sense of adventure and excitement. After the parade part of the event, five friends (some old, some made during the parade part) and I roamed around looking for adventure. After every stop, no one wanted to go home, so we asked each other, “what should we do next?”. We went through Chinatown, visiting a fortune cookie bakery and a restaurant (an Australian girl at the table next to us asked if there was a special event, or if this was an American fad), then we walked back to the mall to visit the spa, and finally ended up at Samovar Tea Lounge.

I’ve resolved to organize more events like this. Not necessarily big group events that involve pantslessness, but fun events for my friends where we break social conventions and make scenes.

Next time you find yourself bored, skip going to the movies. Get some friends together, take off your pants, and go wander around. Or go to the movies, but take off your pants first.

Related Posts

The Most Important Thing in The World

What’s the most important thing in the world? Social skills, if you ask me.

A picture of me with my grandparents, siblings, and some cousins before going sledding

I’m on a Boeing 757. Out of my window I can see the wingtips, which are bent at the ends to improve fuel efficiency. The web address of the airline is printed on the tips, which should seem totally normal, but still reminds me of back before companies took the internet seriously. I notice this every time. Every poster that has a web address, every commercial, and every billboard.

It’s a habit. When I was younger, if businesses even had web sites, they only had it as a precaution– just in case that internet thing started to take off. I took pride when I first began seeing TV commercials with web addresses in them. I was part of the internet generation, and each URL I saw felt like a small personal victory, as if it justified the hours upon hours I spent on the internet.

Occasionally it occurs to me that people not much younger than I am would never even consider this, just as I would never consider it interesting that a company publishes their phone number. That thought, maybe as a result of my glass-is-half-full mentality, always leads me to the next thought: I am really lucky to be born when I was.

Maybe everyone else also feels as though their generation is especially blessed, but I can’t help but think that mine really got the best deal around. In the less than 30 years I’ve been around, I’ve seen the invention of the cell phone, the computer, and the internet. Better than just witnessing it, these things came out when I was a curious teenager with a lot of free time to tinker.

The best part, though, is that none of these things were around when I was really young. I wasn’t allowed to watch TV, so I spent most of my childhood outdoors. Society wasn’t quite so skittish about, well, everything, so my friends, siblings, and I had free run of the neighborhood, which bordered a state park. I could call my friends (on landlines, of course), and go meet them at our fort in the woods, without even needing parental approval. We built things, raced around, and used our imaginations. In the winter we went into the woods to find the biggest hill and make jumps on it. In the summer we made fishing poles out of sticks and dug for worms to impale on the hooks we found near the water’s edge.

I’m not sure that kind of childhood really exists anymore. I know all too well how easy it is to get sucked into the internet and live vicariously rather than actively. Parents are so scared of everything that when I set my kids loose in the neighborhood, they might not have anyone to play with.

Maybe older generations would say the same thing about when they were kids. They certainly do tend to think of “back then” as some sort of golden age. Maybe kids now think feel like they’ve got it great. One thing is certain though: we live in a great time and it will never be like this again. Let’s enjoy it.

Related Posts

Pre-Order Life Nomadic, I’ll Give the Money to Haiti

Pre order a signed copy of Life Nomadic and I’ll donate the purchase price to a Haitian Earthquake relief organization.

What is NOW the Perfect Time For?

What is now the exact perfect time for?

Despite mostly cutting myself off from parental financing in high school, I’ve actually only had a “real” job for less than a year total in my life. I attribute this not to any great genius on my part, but rather to habit. It was what I was used to doing. I knew that I couldn’t get a job when I was a kid, and probably didn’t think too highly of them even back then, but I figured that there must be some way for me to make money on my own.

Tynan Park

I jumped in head first when I was ten, and, as a result, got in way over my head. One of they joys of my childhood was visiting a small amusement park in New Hampshire called “Canobie Lake Park”. I only got to go once or twice per summer, though, and I figured other kids were probably in the same boat. How great would it be if I opened up an amusement park in my neighborhood?

First I dug up my parents back yard (without permission) and made a miniature golf course. I put buckets of water in holes to serve as water features, made and flattened mounds of dirt to make grades, and fashioned parts of a croquet set into obstacles.

We had a rather steep driveway, so I raided my father’s lumber pile and built a track down the driveway that would serve as a roller coaster. I don’t remember exactly how it worked, but the car was a skateboard and I had tied a rope to it to pull it back up once the passenger reached the bottom.

Those were the main features, but I enlisted my neighborhood friends and together we also set up a few carnival style contests. We got one of the parents to bring us to the drug store to buy candy to give away as prizes.

Once the amusement wonderland was complete, I went off to sell tickets which I had drawn on cut out bits of blank paper. My pitch I delivered door to door:

“Hi, my name is Tynan and I have built an amusement park. It will be open every day for the next month and tickets are one dollar. Would you like to buy some?”

Most people were confused and asked if it was for a charity. When I said that I would be keeping the money, they would usually say no. A few said yes, though. After half an afternoon of hard work I sold $20 worth of tickets, which was about a billion dollars in 1992 10-year-old-dollars.

When I got back from my tough day as a salesman, I was delighted to see that one man had actually brought his daughter to the park. I proudly accepted his tickets and guided him to the golf course. He held his daughter’s arms as she swung the putter. All of us kids followed them around on the course, determined to make sure that they had a good time. When she finally completed the course we gave her a handful of candy and one of my brother’s stuffed animals, even though we hadn’t discussed and official mini-golf prize policy.

Once our first and only customer left, though, things went to hell fast. I discovered that one of the kids had eaten all of our prize candy. Infuriated, I shut down Tynan park twenty nine days early. I felt bad about not giving refunds, but didn’t remember who bought tickets and who didn’t. If you have a ticket, I’m happy to give you a refund now.

The Newton

I’m actually skipping a critical step in my path towards entrepreneurship, but the story isn’t all that exciting. My best friend and I made a bunch of friendship bracelets and sold them all summer long. This may sound like a cash cow to you, but the only thing I remember buying with the proceeds was a big cactus, which was later washed down a drain when I was camping out for Star Wars and a storm came through.

This story is about the first time I was able to make enough money to buy something more substantial than a potted succulent.

In graphic design class in high school I sat next to a really white kid. He was the kind of white that can only come from a place like Kentucky, and can only be preserved through complete abstinence from the sun.

We struck up a conversation about the Wacom tablet the class had, which is a digital pad that you draw on with a stylus and it magically translates your art to the screen.

“I have something like that at home. It’s called an Apple Newton, and it’s basically a portable computer that you write on with a pen. I’ll bring it in some time.”

A few days later, he brought it in. An Apple Newton 110. In case you don’t know, the Newton was a precursor to the Palm Pilot, which was a precursor to your iPhone.

He offered to loan it to me for a few days, and if I wanted to buy it he would sell it for $60. I took him up on the loan and fell in love with the thing over the weekend. It didn’t do much, but, man, was it neat.

I went online to see how much a Newton was worth. The 110 was worth around $60, as he’d priced it. Something was peculiar, though. His Newton had a clear plastic shell, while every other one I saw was black. I searched for “clear Newton”, and was shocked by what I read.

The clear Newtons were very rare and were given exclusively to Apple execs. They were worth hundreds, and hard to find even at that price. I brought $60 into school the next day and paid for my treasure.

I immediately went to the Newton Users Forum, where there was a forum for buying and selling Newtons. I posted an ad saying that I would like to trade my super-rare clear Newton 110 for a 120, 130, or maybe even the legendary Newton 2000. I had no idea I’d be making a business out of this — I just didn’t care about the color of the Newton and wanted to get the best one I could.

Emails flooded in. Most people were offering a 130, but one girl said she desperately wanted the clear one and would give me her 2000 in trade. I responded to her and the person with the best 130, and emailed both of them several times over the next few days. All of a sudden, at the verge of agreeing to the final terms, the girl with the 2000 changed her mind.

I couldn’t figure out why she had cold feet all of a sudden. I had my heart set on the 2000 and couldn’t imagine settling for a 130 anymore. I started deleting all of the Newton emails other than hers and the best 130. Their emails were next to each other in my inbox, and I noticed something: both of them had the same last name.

He was her father. As soon as I realized what was up I emailed him and told him that I was going to hold out for a 2000, and that if his daughter wanted it, she would have to trade hers. He was angry, but he finally caved.

Suddenly getting a shiny Newton wasn’t all that exciting anymore– I could make a business out of this. Back then eBay existed, but wasn’t popular. There were a few classifieds sites, like Classifieds2000.com, as well as item-specific classifieds like the Newton forum, but most people didn’t know about all these places.

Bouncing back and forth between the different auction sites, classifieds, and forums, I managed to trade up my Newton until I had a stock of Palm Pilots and laptops, which I would keep flipping. For four or five years, up until I started gambling professionally, I made my income buyng and selling small computers and PDAs. The money was great, but the most exciting part was being young and having access to all the toys and gadgets I lusted after.

I probably could have carried on without Tynan Park, but I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t gotten such a good deal on that Newton. Maybe I’d be a manager at Wal-Mart.

Related Posts

Born at the Right Time

I feel lucky for being born when I was. I got to experience computers and the internet becoming popular, but these things didn’t interfere with my childhood.

Pre-Order Life Nomadic, I’ll Give the Money to Haiti

Pre order a signed copy of Life Nomadic and I’ll donate the purchase price to a Haitian Earthquake relief organization.

Why I Don’t Buy Apple Products

I don’t buy Apple products because they’re intended for the mainstream and aren’t as well suited to my specific needs as products from other companies.

I’ve given up on doing my yearly or bi-yearly goals. Why? I don’t actually do them, and I don’t actually care. I like having a somewhat chaotic life, changing my priorities and focus as I go along. Most of the time when I look back at my previous incomplete goals I’m glad I didn’t complete them, or at least I’m glad I sacrificed them for other goals. When I do actually complete a yearly goal, it tends to be because it remained important to me, not because I was constantly referring back to my goal list.

This year I’m going to try something a little bit different. I’m going to cover what I did this year and what I could have done better.

Here’s what I did that I’m happy about:

1. I traveled. I visited four new countries: Morocco, The Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Portugal. I also visited some new cities in countries I’d already been to: Panama (Boquete, Valle de Anton, Bocas, Almirante, Yaviza), England (Oxford, Bristol), Spain (Vigo, Coruna), and a few new places in the US. On top of all that, I visited a bunch of cities in the US and elsewhere that I’ve already been to.
2. I learned how to fix a moped. For a while now I’ve felt like one of my bigger deficiencies is that I was completely mechanically inept. I bought a moped, which is about the simplest vehicle you can own, and have nearly mastered it. I’ve replaced the air filter, carb, spark plug, fuel line and filter, petcock, exhaust, piston, and cylinder. I’ve also adjusted the throttle cable, brake cables, idle, and probably some other things. On top of all that, I learned how to replace the plugs and wires on my RV. All in all I feel like I have a MUCH stronger idea of how engines work and feel comfortable working on them.
3. I made a lot of new friends. Not much to say about this, but it deserves to be on the list!
4. I wrote and published a new book. As you probably know by now, I wrote and published Life Nomadic. It isn’t actually up on Amazon yet, but I do have a paperback proof in my RV. It’s hard to compare to my last book, since it’s on a totally different topic, but I’m proud of it and have gotten great feedback on it.
5. My Spanish and Japanese have greatly improved. I practice my Spanish just about every day with Vicente at Samovar. Just yesterday I saw a video of me speaking Spanish earlier in the year, and the improvement is day and night. I self taught myself Kanji (and have since forgotten TONS), and hired a great tutor for Japanese. Much improvement there, too.
6. I sold a company. It didn’t sell for much, but Conversion Doubler sold a few months ago.
7. I relocated my home base to San Francisco. I won’t spend all year there or anything, but I really like the city and will use it as my hub rather than Austin (though I’ll be there several times a year, too).
8. I started cooking again. I used to cook all the time back when I ate crappy food. I had a secret: add a lot of butter and everything tastes amazing. Once I stopped eating butter, cooking was less fun. There aren’t any 100% healthy restaurants in SF that I love, so I’ve begun to cook every day again. I use mostly fresh vegetables from the farm and have learned to use some weird ingredients I’d never cooked before (leeks, beets, kohlrabi, tempeh, cabbage, various greens, etc).
9. I didn’t add any new shows to my roster. I resisted watching new shows, even though they’re constantly recommended to me. I do follow some old favorites (Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office, 24), but I’m eagerly waiting for them to get cancelled so that I will be 100% TV free.
10. I remodeled my RV. With a lot of help from my father (mainly expertise and advice, not as much physical labor as previous projects), I put in wood floors, a marble foyer, a new fridge / kitchen, and an additional solar panel (for 360 watts total). The RV Is now basically a mobile luxury efficiency apartment that doesn’t cost me any rent or bills. I love it.
11. Tynan.net broke the Alexa top 100k. According to Alexa.com, my blog is now one of the top 100,000 most popular sites on the internet. Pretty cool when you consider the millions or billions of sites out there. I also have a lot of readers now: almost 13,000 on RSS / E-Mail. You guys leave great comments, send me great emails, and in some cases add a lot to my life in real life. Thanks for being part of this.
12. I got up to 100 wpm. It’s been almost two years since switching to Dvorak (Wow… it doesn’t feel like that long), and I’m glad I’ve hit 100wpm. This isn’t super important, but it makes me happy.
13. I came up with an awesome plan. This is just a teaser, really, but you’ll definitely know what it is by next year.

Sometimes it doesn’t seem like I’m doing much, but looking back on this list, I feel like I got a lot of worthwhile stuff done, and I’m better off than I was a year ago. There are also a few noteworthy things I should have done better.

1. I should have worked out more. I used to be very hardcore about working out. For a year or so I didn’t miss more than a few Crossfit workouts. Then, in 2009, I didn’t do ANY regular workouts. Part of it is because I’ve decided I like being skinny and don’t really care about putting on muscle, but there are a lot of health benefits to working out that I’m missing out on.
2. I’m not 100% satisfied with my travel. I had a great time and loved everywhere I went, but I wish I went to at least a couple more new countries. Specifically, I’ve wanted to go to Japan since the day I left there in 2008, and somehow didn’t go in 2009.
3. I made a couple mistakes with girls. Without getting into details, I can think of examples where I showed more interest than was appropriate in some cases, and less interest than was appropriate in others. Not a giant deal, but mostly a reminder to be a little more aware and make sure that I’m expressing myself clearly.
4. Productivity really dipped for a while. I’m way back on the train now, but for a couple months I feel like I didn’t make much progress. I rested on my laurels of “being a productive person” and wasted time online and on insignificant tasks until I wasn’t actually a productive person anymore.

That’s about it. There are definitely some things overlooked in each category, but I think I’ve covered the big ones. For the first year in a while, I’m not going to set goals or make predictions. Instead I’ll just focus on having another amazing year.

Related Posts

Review of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

My review of Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell.

The Most Important Thing in The World

What’s the most important thing in the world? Social skills, if you ask me.

The Peg System: How to Memorize Lists of Ten in Twenty Seconds

Learn how to impress your friends by memorizing lists almost instantly and teaching them how to do it, too.

I like taking a problem and coming up with a solution so extreme that I end up happy I had the problem in the first place. Taking showers in the RV is acceptable at best, and on cool winter days is a bit of a chore. I solved that problem by joining a spa in San Francisco, where every day I now take a shower, sit in the steam room while eating an apple, sit in the hot pool, and then take another shower. I may actually be one of the cleanest people in San Francisco.

Another problem I had was that my RV was hard to clean. The whole thing was carpeted, including the kitchen area, which added an element of danger to cooking. One slip up and my rug catches a permanent splotch of goulash.

I thought about putting down linoleum floors, but I wasn’t crazy about the idea of my home on wheels looking like a middle school cafeteria. I whipped out my tape measure and measured the actual exposed floor space. Thirty-two square feet. That’s so little that I may as well get any flooring I like.

My father, always willing to help with my crazy projects, and certainly a lot more qualified to do them than I am, offered to help me renovate the RV over Thanksgiving break. We chose hand scraped maple wood for the floors and a two-color marble mosaic for the entryway. We also took the microwave out, refinished the refrigerator area, and made a few other upgrades.

The hardest part was removing the old floor. Once we took a knife to the carpet we’d crossed the point of no return, but I soon had my doubts. The carpet was glued to the foam sub-layer and the foam was glued to the metal and wood floor. It was so hard to cut that we eventually used a grinding tool to cut it into strips, and then I’d rip it up with all of my strength. It took hours to do.

Things moved quickly after the several hour demolition process. Here are some photos of the finished work:

(Front of the RV with Aeron chair, wood floors, and wool rug)

(Marble foyer area. It’s very easy to clean and can get wet, which makes it perfect for rainy days)

(Newly mounted fridge. The brass thing is a quick disconnect for the propane powered heater/fireplace I have)

(This is the removable panel that can be removed to reveal the infrequently used shower. Notice the perfect seam between the panel and the front area.)

(A view from outside. You can see the microwave-free kitchen and teacups that hang from hooks. Just to be hilarious I want to cover the translucent plastic dome with real gold leaf. Does anyone know how to apply it to plastic?)

(Close up of where the microwave was. The magnet is strong enough to hold my knives, spatula, and lighter even on tough bumps. You can also see the stainless steel which covers up the wiring that was behind the microwave. We moved the light up there to make it easier to cook.)

(One last picture from the front, showing where I sit and write a lot of these posts.)

The whole cost of the project was just a few hundred dollars, plus four days of my time and most of my dad’s time. A small price to pay to transform my RV into a veritable rolling palace.

You’ll have to excuse the terrible picture, but I also put a new solar panel on a couple weeks ago. I bought it an hour outside of San Francisco and put it next to my bed in the RV. It was so big that I was annoyed at the prospect of it sitting in the RV for a week or two, so I stopped at a Home Depot and put it on in the parking lot. I got some weird looks, but now I have 360 watts of power generation.

I love doing weird projects that push the envelope a bit. There’s something fun about doing things that no one else has done– and that no reasonable person would likely do.

For good measure, here’s a picture of my dad and me:

Related Posts

How to Actually Save Water

What uses more water? Eating a 16 ounce steak or taking fifteen minute showers every day for a month? The answer will surprise you.

VIDEO: Tour of my RV

A walkthrough of my RV including some of the modifications I’ve done to it. The HD video was taken with my Panasonic GF1.

The Shower Movie Theater

Aware that I waste time in the shower, I set up a projector in my bathroom so that I can watch TV while I shower.

I once visited some friends in San Francisco who had copied our idea of renting an extravagant house and splitting the cost between the pickup artists who lived there. We called ours Project Hollywood, they called theirs Project San Francisco.

We sat around their living room, bonding over stories of the perks and follies of communal living. Chores were a sore subject. Our house was always messy– so messy that maids usually quit after cleaning up after us once. Their house was clean. How did they do it?

“Our goal is to keep our place at a nine out of ten in cleanliness.”

Nine out of ten was good enough. Who else admits, even for something small like keeping their house clean, that their goal isn’t perfection?

Crossfit, a popular (and amazing) fitness program, does. Coach Glassman, the founder of Crossfit, once said this, comparing Crossfit to other workout programs:

"We do what you do almost as well as you, you can’t do our stuff at all, and we do what neither of us do better than you can."

A top Crossfit athlete won’t win a marathon. The guy who has trained his whole life for marathon running will win it. Crossfit athletes are okay with that. If a Crossfit athlete were to compete in a weight lifting contest, he probably wouldn’t win at that either. And, like the marathon, that wouldn’t bother him either.

Crossfit isn’t in the business of preparation. It’s in the business of readiness. A Crossfit athlete is ready for anything. He may not win the marathon, but he’ll probably complete it, even though he hasn’t ever specifically trained for it.

You can prepare for a trip, or you can be ready to travel. The prepared traveler who goes to Costa Rica will have a snorkeling mask, two bathing suits, and sun tan lotion. He’s ready for Costa Rica. He knows he’s staying at a resort, so he has two suitcases full of stuff. The porters will carry it for him.

On the other hand, I’d show up to Costa Rica with a completely different set of stuff. My small backpack can’t accommodate a snorkeling mask, so I’d have to borrow one. I have one Speedo, which I might have to wear even if it’s still wet from the previous day’s swimming. The prepared traveler’s experience in Costa Rica will be slightly easier than mine.

The benefits of readiness kick in when I buy a last minute plane ticket from Costa Rica to Alaska. The warm clothes I pack may have been useless in Costa Rica, but they keep me warm in Alaska. Not as warm as people who packed big down sleeping-bag jackets, but warm enough. A nine out of ten.

I base my whole life around readiness. I’m not a master of any language other than English (and even that could be debated), but I can get by in three or four others. I’m not a master chef, but I can cook a pretty good meal out of just about anything. I probably couldn’t get a job as a programmer, but if I need a program or web site written, I can do it myself.

Embracing readiness is accepting that life is chaotic and random. The more things you’re ready for, the more opportunities you can take and the more you can squeeze out of life. Readiness grants you resilience, and the ability to operate off the beaten path, whether you got there by choice or by accident. By adopting a goal of readiness, you become best prepared for life.